Enough deaths on the high­way

Po­lice re­cently an­nounced 10 hot spot road polic­ing ar­eas across New Zealand. State High­way 1 south of Whanga¯ rei is one, so I asked the Min­is­ter for Trans­port how many deaths had there been in the past 10 years across all of the hot spot ar­eas.

This ta­ble shows that Whanga¯ rei to Mars­den is the dead­li­est road in New Zealand across all hotspots with 0.74 deaths per km.

I con­structed this ta­ble a few weeks ago and, since then, there have been a fur­ther two deaths over Labour week­end. I wrote to the Min­is­ter last week and he con­firmed that the deaths per km for this stretch of road are now 0.82 per km. Do we have to wait un­til ev­ery sin­gle km rep­re­sents an­other death? Come on Labour gov­ern­ment, lis­ten to the may­ors, lis­ten to the MPS, lis­ten to the elec­torate.

Whangarei de­serves bet­ter than hav­ing the dead­li­est hotspot road in the coun­try — build the four lanes. Enough!